We’ve mentioned before that improving yourself or a team works so much better if you have the evidence to back up your findings. It not only removes someone’s opinion from the conversation, it shows exactly where the ‘problem’ comes from.
As an analytics tool focussed on improving software developers, teams, and projects, we understand the importance of this. Especially because our product serves a very aware audience. Magic doesn’t work for us.
Our latest two product features are designed to support a team’s ability to improve with what they see happening in their profiles.
A quick description of each of these features and how this can help you.
Showing significant change through indicators
Each time a team or person’s daily activity is significantly higher or lower than their average activity we flag this. Some examples of what this could be;
- A team’s politeness went up because of a positive change in their sentiment in Confluence.
- An individual’s Javascript went down because of a higher amount of bugs
Adding contextual notes
Can you remember if you had a productive day last week’s Tuesday, or if things didn’t go as smooth as normal? What about two weeks ago? Well, if you can you are probably one of the few. When listening to Serial Season 1 I tried really hard, but failed every time. If I don’t take notes throughout a fortnightly sprint I even struggle with the Sprint Retro!
For people like me, and most of us we have included contextual notes. It’s a simple free form text field linked to a day. It allows you to create context to the activity within Umano. A 4 hour meeting 🙁 or maybe everything just worked really well, and everyone was aligned after a productive planning session.
The note will be visible to everyone on a project or in a team, so be polite! This will help your peers, or manager who wasn’t aware of this understand the change in activity. A note is linked to a day and will show up on every level on that day.
The panel on the right-hand side has the ability to add notes to a future date for events that you are aware of already.
Talk about it!
So now you know ‘where’ the change in activity comes from, you’ve added context and now have a foundation to talk about with your team and managers about. It’s about championing positive change and creating goals around the areas you want to improve.